He is cited over 80 times in the Oxford English Dictionary, notably on words such as “barbecue”, “avocado”, “chopsticks” and “sub-species”. That is not to say he coined the words, but his use of them in his writings is the first known example in English.
(Wikipedia)

“ … having removed me from the Latin school to learn writing and arithmetic, they soon after placed me with a master of a ship at Weymouth, complying with the inclinations I had very early of seeing the world.”

Their licences were known as Letters of Marque (…), issued and controlled by admiralties. Letters of Marque were impressive documents, festooned with seals and dressed in impenetrable legalese.
(Gill, S. 73)

„In honest service there is thin rations, low wages and hard labour; in this [Piraterie], plenty and satiety, pleasure and ease, liberty and power; and who would not balance creditor on this side, when all the hazard that is run for it, at worst, is only a sour look or two at choking. No, a merry life and a short one shall be my motto.“
Bartholomew Roberts

A New Voyage Round the World (1697)
Voyages and Descriptions (1699)
A Voyage to New Holland (1703)
A Supplement of the Voyage Round the World (1705)
The Campeachy Voyages (1705)
A Discourse of Winds (1705)
A Continuation of a Voyage to New Holland (1709)

July212014

Every black child in grade school is taught Adolph Hitler killed six million Jews and is the worst human being that ever lived. On the other hand our children are taught “The Right Honorable” Cecil Rhodes the founder of the De Beer diamond company in South Africa who killed ten times that number of Africans is a hero and a statesman and if they study hard and do well in school they may be eligible to win Rhodes Scholarships the oldest and most celebrated international fellowship awards in the world. They don’t mention the scholarships are paid for with the blood of their ancestors.

--------------------

// oAnth 2014-07-21

IMHO it depends too much on the context, by which you might feel yourself compelled to use those
comparisons of atrocities, whether such a confrontation of disgusting
characters is insightful or just horribly misleading - be aware, for it would most
likely end as a rhetoric gate opener to revanchism.

July102014

Shir
Hever is an economic researcher in the Alternative Information Center, a
Palestinian-Israeli organization active in Jerusalem and Beit-Sahour.
Hever researches the economic aspect of the Israeli occupation of the
Palestinian territory, some of his research topics include the
international aid to the Palestinians and to Israel, the effects of the
Israeli occupation of the Palestinian territories on the Israeli
economy, and the boycott, divestment and sanctions campaigns against
Israel. His work also includes giving lectures and presentations on the
economy of the occupation. He is a graduate student at the Freie
Universitat in Berlin, and researches the privatization of security in
Israel. His first book: Political Economy of Israel’s Occupation:
Repression Beyond Exploitation, was published by Pluto Press.

[...]

HEVER:
I was born in Jerusalem, and I was born into a lefty household, a
critical household. And the most important thing that I think my parents
taught me and raised me with is this idea that I have to be aware of my
own privileges and to take responsibility for them, because Israeli
society is extremely divided and extremely hierarchical, and I am lucky
to have been born male, white, Jewish, Ashkenazi, so in all of these
categories in which I had an advantage, and my parents told me this is
an unfair advantage.

[...]

JAY: Now, just because it’s an
interesting kind of historical note, there’s kind of two types of
Zionist fascists. There are Zionists who are simply very aggressive
against Palestinians and people called them fascists, and then there are
Zionists who loved Mussolini.

HEVER: Yeah, I’m talking about the
second kind. I’m talking about real—people who really adopt this kind of
Zionist—or this kind of fascist ideology that the state is above
everything, and that we all have to conform to a certain idea, and that
we should find our great leader. So that kind of Zionism is not
mainstream, actually, and it’s not in power. In many demonstrations that
I had the chance to go to, people tend to shout that fascism will not
pass.But, of course, when you look at it from a more academic point of
view, there’s a difference between fascism and other kinds of repressive
regimes, and I would say Israel is a colonial regime, a colonialist
regime, in which there’s apartheid, there’s very deep entrenched
repression.

But in a colonialist system there’s always fear. And you grow up with this fear also. You always know—.

JAY: Did you?

HEVER:
Yeah, yeah. I mean, when I would go to certain areas or when I took a
taxi with a Palestinian driver, then even my closest family would get
nervous about it. And then it made me wonder: how come you taught me
that everybody’s equal but you’re still afraid of Palestinians?

[...]

(M)y
close family, my immediate family, they were very supportive of my
opinions. And we had many political debates at home—sometimes arguments,
but in the end I think for the outsider it doesn’t seem like we’re that
much far apart. When you go a little bit further to the extended
family, then that’s a whole different story. And most of the family on
my mother’s side stopped speaking with me after I decided not to go to
the army. And so, yeah, my mother’s parents, who were fighters in the
Palmach, they had a completely different worldview and a very Zionist
right-wing perspective in which they believe that all of these policies
against Palestinians were completely justified.

JAY: And your
grandparents, were any of them—when did they come to Israel? Did you
have direct family that were killed during World War II?

HEVER:
Yeah. So this is actually the exact—the interesting intersection of two
stories, because my mother’s side of the family came to Palestine before
the Holocaust, before the Second World War, and participated in the
Nakba against Palestinians. And my father’s family—.

JAY: So they came during the ’30s or ’20s?

HEVER:
Yeah, over some time, but yeah. And my father’s family came right after
the war. They escaped from the Nazis in Poland. And the vast majority
of the family in Poland was exterminated by the Nazis. So they escaped
to the Soviet Union, where they lived pretty harsh years during the war.
And then the family scattered again, and that part of the family that
chose to go to Palestine, to Israel, happened to be my side of the
family.

[...]

HEVER: That is a concept called Hebrew labor,
and it was done very openly and without shame because there was at that
point of time no concept that such structural and comprehensive racism
against a particular group of people is something that Jews should also
be worried about. I mean, it wasn’t something that was even in people’s
minds so much, because Palestinians were part of the scenery, part of
the background, and not treated as the native inhabitants of Palestine.
But it has to be said also that during those fights it wasn’t—even
though it was a colonial situation, in which Zionists were supported by
foreign powers in coming and colonizing Palestine, it wasn’t clear if
they were going to succeed or not, and it wasn’t clear until 1948
whether they would succeed or not. So from the personal stories of these
people, they saw themselves as heroes or as overcoming a great
adversity, and not as people who had all their options and decided that
here’s a little piece of land that we want to add to our collection.
From their point of view, this was their chance to have their own piece
of land, and when looking at the colonial powers, the European colonial
powers operating all of the world, they didn’t think that what they were
doing was so strange or peculiar.

[...]

HEVER: And during
the ’90s there was—the Oslo process began. There was a coalition between
Yitzhak Rabin from the Labor Party and Meretz, which was the part that
they supported. Meretz was the liberal party for human rights, but still
a Zionist party. And this coalition started to negotiate with Yasser
Arafat and to start the Oslo process. But at the same time, they would
implement these policies that were just completely undemocratic and—for
example, to take 400 people who were suspected of being members of the
Hamas Party without a trial and just deport them. And at that point my
parents had a kind of crisis of faith and they decided not to support
his party anymore. And I would say this is the moment where Zionism was
no longer accepted.

[...]

HEVER: I think the moment that I
made that choice is actually much later, because it’s possible to have
all these opinions but still play the game and go to any regular career
path. But after I decided not to go into the army and after I decided to
go to university, in the university I experienced something that
changed my mind.

JAY: But back up one moment. You decide not to go into the army. (...) That’s a big decision in Israel.

HEVER:
Well, I was again lucky to be in this very interesting time period
where Netanyahu just became prime minister, and he was being very
bombastic about his announcements, and a lot of people started doubting
the good sense of going into the army. So it was a time where it was
relatively easy to get out. At first I thought, I will go into the army,
because I went to a very militaristic school. My school was very proud
of all the intelligence officers that used to come out of it. So I
thought, okay, I don’t want to be an occupier, I don’t want to be a
combat soldier in the occupied territory, but if I’ll find some some
kind of loophole that I can be a teacher or do some kind of noncombat
work for the army, I’ll do that.

[...]

And I used to support
the Oslo process, because I used to read the Israeli newspapers, and it
seemed like Israel is being very generous and willing to negotiate,
when in fact—. But my mother, I said that she was working for the
government. She would bring me some documents about the Oslo process,
and there I would be able to read about the water allocation and about
land allocation and say, well, this is certainly not a fair kind of
negotiation. But then, when the Second Intifada started, it was
repressed with extreme violence by the Israeli military, by the Israeli
police. And that was also a moment in which I felt that even living in
Israel is becoming unbearable for me. But there’s always kind of the
worry, is it going to get to the next step? I think this immediate
tendency to compare it with the ’30s in Germany is because it’s a Jewish
society.

The
Palmach (Hebrew: פלמ"ח, acronym for Plugot Maḥatz (Hebrew: פלוגות מחץ),
lit. “strike forces”) was the elite fighting force of the Haganah, the
underground army of the Yishuv (Jewish community) during the period of
the British Mandate for Palestine. The Palmach was established on 15 May
1941. By the outbreak of the Israeli War for Independence in 1948 it
consisted of over 2,000 men and women in three fighting brigades and
auxiliary aerial, naval and intelligence units. With the creation of
Israel’s army, the three Palmach Brigades were disbanded. This and
political reasons led to many of the senior Palmach officers resigning
in 1950.

Meretz
defines itself as a Zionist, left-wing, social-democratic party. The
party is a member of the Socialist International and an observer member
of the Party of European Socialists. It sees itself as the political
representative of the Israeli Peace movement in the Knesset – as well as
municipal councils and other local political bodies.In the
international media it has been described as left-wing,
social-democratic, dovish, secular, civil libertarian, and
anti-occupation.

"Hebrew
labor" is often also referred to as “Jewish labor” although the former
is the literal translation of “avoda ivrit”. According to Even-Zohar the
immigrants of the Second Aliyah preferred to use the word “Hebrew”
because they wanted to emphasize the difference between their “new
Hebrew” identity and the “old Diaspora Jewish” identity. For them the
word “Hebrew” had romantic connotations with the “purity” and
“authenticity” of the existence of the “Hebrew nation in its land”, like
it had been in the past.

Related to the concept of “Hebrew labor” was the concept of “alien
labor”. Ben-Gurion wrote about the settlers of the First Aliyah: “They
introduced the idol of exile to the temple of national rebirth, and the
creation of the new homeland was desecrated by avodah zara”. According
to Shapira avodah zara means both “alien labor” and, in a religious
sense, “idol worship”. Along with bloodshed and incest this is one of
the three worst sins in Judaism. Application of this concept to the
employment of Arab workers by Jews depicted this as a taboo.

February242013

"History and Identity in the Late Antique Near East", edited by Philip Wood

Egypte actus's curator insight, Today, 8:23 AM

History and Identity in the Late Antique Near East gathers together the work of distinguished historians and early career scholars with a broad range of expertise to investigate the significance of newly emerged, or recently resurrected, ethnic identities on the borders of the eastern Mediterranean world. It focuses on the "long late antiquity" from the eve of the Arab conquest of the Roman East to the formation of the Abbasid caliphate. The first half of the book offers papers on the Christian Orient on the cusp of the Islamic invasions. These papers discuss how Christians negotiated the end of Roman power, whether in the selective use of the patristic past to create confessional divisions or the emphasis of the shared philosophical legacy of the Greco-Roman world. The second half of the book considers Muslim attempts to negotiate the pasts of the conquered lands of the Near East, where the Christian histories of Hira or Egypt were used to create distinctive regional identities for Arab settlers. Like the first half, this section investigates the redeployment of a shared history, this time the historical imagination of the Qu'ran and the era of the first caliphs. All the papers in the volume bring together studies of the invention of the past across traditional divides between disciplines, placing the re-assessment of the past as a central feature of the long late antiquity. As a whole, History and Identity in the Late Antique Near East represents a distinctive contribution to recent writing on late antiquity, due to its cultural breadth, its interdisciplinary focus, and its novel definition of late antiquity itself.

Sophronius of Jerusalem and the end of roman history / Phil Booth -- Identity, philosophy, and the problem of Armenian history in the sixth century / Tara Andrews -- The chronicle of Seert and Roman ecclesiastical history in the Sasanian world / Philip Wood -- Why were the Syrians interested in Greek philosophy? / Dan King -- You are what you read: Qenneshre and the Miaphysite church in the seventh century / Jack Tannous -- The prophet's city before the prophet: Ibn Zabala (d. after 199/814) on pre-Islamic Medina / Harry Munt -- Topoi and topography in the histories of al-?ira / Adam Talib -- "The crinkly haired people of the black earth"; examining Egyptian identities in Ibn 'abd al-?akam's futu? / Hussein Omar -- Forgetting Ctesiphon: Iran's pre-Islamic past, ca. 800-1100 / Sarah Savant -- Legal knowledge and local practices under the early Abbasids / Mathiew Tillier.

February132013

Reorganizing the database is one of the tasks of Susanne Urban, the ITS head of research, who joined the archive in 2009 after working in Yad Vashem, Israel's official memorial to the Holocaust. She says she expects the archive to reveal a plethora of "mosaic stones" to complete the picture of the genocide rather than alter it.

"Here you keep getting confronted with the global aspect of the Holocaust and survival, you see how it started in Germany, spread across Europe and with the documents about the survivors we see how a web of memory has spread across the whole world. Here you get an overview over everything. What makes it so harrowing is that you don't just get one aspect, you get them all. You sense this monolith that was built of pain and sorrow."

The work may be fascinating, but it can also be exhausting and saddening. Urban has only two research assistants on temporary contracts, which she says isn't enough.

Before we delve into the reasons for the crisis of the state it is necessary to clarify the meaning of ‘nation’. Nation has a cultural connotation and its distant origins are historically much older than state: it is still recognisable as a nation even when its borders have not been marked out and, at least formally, it is still not a state with its own laws. A population that is recognised as a nation feels free in the territory in which it lives and does not need to set limits on their freedom of movement within that space that they feel belongs to them.

And yet a country can continue to exist only if it exists as a state, that reinforces its identity and ensures precise territorial limits, because while the idea of “nation” is a feeling, the state – more pragmatically – needs a territory in which to take root. According to Jürgen Habermas, on the other hand, “national community does not precede the political community, but it is the product of it” (The Postnational Constellation: Political Essays, Polity Press, 2000, p. 76). A statement which is partially accepted, if we admit that the idea of nationality can mature only within a state, which, however, does not take into account the presence of a core of national feeling (although not institutionalised) on which to build a state.

State and nation go together and support each other, but something began to change in the late seventies and subsequent decades, in correspondence to the dissolution of modernity.

The anthropologist Arjun Appadurai was the first to report that the concept of nation is entering a crisis (Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization, University of Minnesota, 1996), because it is the very cultural identity that is first damaged by the change taking place. What is called into doubt is the idea of the national community, based on the same language, same customs, same religion, same culture.

The opening of borders is preceded by a cultural openness that upsets the age-old certainties. The idea of nation endures while the presence of linguistic, religious or political minorities is “confined” temporarily or geographically in “enclaves” in ghettos, in refugee camps or in shelters. Then, when the diasporic communities begin to see recognition of their rights as citizens with full rights, and then demand recognition of their “diversity” with respect to the obligation to integrate (the customary path towards equality), the ‘unity of the nation begins to crumble.

Already in the nineties, Appadurai talked about post-national states, where diasporic communities are no longer occasional or temporary events, but long-lasting ones built into the system, which have become an integral part of the culture and history of a country. The term post-national better defines the earlier concepts of multinational and international, that remain fairly strongly related to economic, legal and practical dependence with the state as reference, until the entire system is weakened.

We live in a constant state of crisis, and this crisis also involves the modern state, whose structure, functionality, effectiveness (including the system of democratic representation) are no longer suited to the times in which we live.

There are many critical issues facing the modern state and the causes are many: some induced by deep historical and cultural changes that took place between the end of the twentieth century and the beginning of the third millennium, others by political and economic choices that led to consequences in people’s daily lives, further exasperating the distance from the institutions.

In the first place, the end of the post-Westphalian model. It appears crucial to an understanding of the present condition starting from the loss of meaning of this model of balance between states, which has stood for centuries and has been the cornerstone of international relations. The Treaties of Westphalia (Münster and Osnabrück) in 1648 (then essentially reconfirmed by the statute of the United Nations) have established some basic principles on which to base the rights and limits of the modern state, the new civil system that was born from the ashes of feudalism and that Hobbes represented as metaphoric in Leviathan: a form of monstrous strength made up of all the men who gathered together and recognised each other in a superior unity.

Based on the principle of limited sovereignty, the post-Westphalian model recognises in the modern state absolute and indivisible sovereignty over its territory and ownership in international relations, of which it is the sole subject.

If for a long time the state and nation have been able to live together, united on a historical and legal level by the insolubility of the fundamental principles that modernity assured, it was thanks to the agreements made in the Treaties of Westphalia, at the end of the long religious war, that had shattered Europe for thirty years. Since then, modern states, in the form that we have known for centuries, have standardised the so-called “post-Westphalian model”, which sets down the rules of universal stability and recognises the full sovereignty of a state within its own borders.

In the third millennium, it is the very post-Westphalian model that enters into crisis, dragging with it the crisis of the modern state, which is determined not only by the opening of borders, but by the inability demonstrated in maintaining its commitments to its citizens. In this phase, it is the “internal” boundaries that create problems. Security, defence of privilege, identity, recognition and cultural traditions, which once coincided with the boundaries of the post-Westphalian state, are now altered, uncertain, liquid. They are no longer reliable.

The dissolution of geographical or temporal limits imposed on diasporic communities determines the well-known phenomenon of the turnaround: if in the past it was the majorities that enclosed the minorities in “enclaves”, now it is the same majorities that shut themselves inside the “gated communities”, guarded by private security guards, by electronic control and security systems; jealous of the privacy that is no longer guaranteed on the outside.

Now it is clear how this model entered into crisis with the development of globalisation, whose explosive force has erased the boundaries between states and undermined any claim of absolute sovereignty. But the consequences of globalisation are not limited only to undermining the rules of international relations; they have led to a further upheaval, removing the power and raising it to a higher level. Now it is distant and spread on a global level, thus separated from politics, with which, up to now, it had been intimately linked. Hobbes’s Leviathan, deprived of its operating arm, is reduced to a mutilated body that wallows in its impotence. It gets agitated, argues and proclaims, but can not do anything even when it has made momentous decisions because the operational side is the responsibility of others. This no longer belongs to it.

The separation of politics and power is lethal to the modern state. Especially if it is a democratic state, whose constitution has promised its citizens to let them take part in common decisions that but now are taken by bodies that are non-democratically appointed or controlled from the bottom. The tragedy of the modern state lies in its inability to implement at a global level the decisions taken locally. The citizen, for example, elects their representatives to the European Parliament, who, in turn, elect committees and subcommittees, where executive decisions are taken by the last organisational bodies, formed on the basis of a series of institutional changes, the complexity of which should be a guarantee of impartiality and independence.

If it were just a matter of bureaucracy, complicated by the presence of more than one body, the system would still retain some form of democracy, although there is no direct relationship (no feedback, no opportunity to reply) between the last of the voters of a small European country and the drafter of a Community regulation. The problem is more serious, from the moment when the most important decisions on an economic, financial and developmental level are taken not by institutional bodies, as required by a democratic system, though it be a rather loose network, but by groups of power, by holding companies, multinationals, lobbies and the so-called “market”, that is by a summation of personal actions, technical consequences, emotional reactions, political will and particular interests that overlap in a very confusing manner and determine the fate of millions of people without any liability. Everything seems to happen because this is how the world turns and no one is able to oppose it. Not the people taking to the streets, protesting, whose only result is, at best, to sensitise public opinion that is otherwise distracted by an excess of information. Not even the nation-state, which does not have the instruments needed to operate at global distances and never had, since the issue had never been raised before.

Before being physical, political, legal and economic, in compliance with the post-Westphalian model, borders have always maintained that balance of strength and relationships which now no longer exists.

The crisis of the state coincides with the crisis of the post-Westphalian model, whose certainties have been swept away by the opening of borders, by increasingly more rapid exchanges of communications, by an economy at a global or supranational level and, not least, by a culture which is no longer at a local level, and is deeply influenced by suggestions, information, and comments from all over the world. The global village of McLuhan was created (or is being created) thanks to economic and cultural exchange, but at the expense of system-states that it is no longer in line with the changing times.